IMO it's foolish to think the laptop form factor is going anywhere, barring a fundamental shift in UX. Anything that requires productivity, e.g. content creation, is better done with a keyboard and some kind of instrument more precise than a finger. Any work involving accumulation of material from multiple sources (e.g. research) i.e. multitasking, is going to benefit from a larger screen form factor.

It's no surprise that mobile is eating consumption use cases as it means people can consume wherever they find themselves. But for the most part tablet UIs are just scaled up versions of phone UIs, even though individual apps may show more content laid out better with the additional real estate, multitasking and input don't work quite as well as laptops.

VR will almost certainly precipitate a fundamental shift in UI. I don't see how it could not.

Whether the result will usurp mouse+keyboard remains to be seen, but I suspect it will. Body tracking just has more bandwidth.

How do you get to "almost certainly"? What makes you think people want to wear a VR headset to get real work done? It's not even established what the effects of long-term VR usage are.

> IMO it's foolish to think the laptop form factor is going anywhere, barring a fundamental shift in UX

Hindsight is 20/20: I remember a time (2012-ish) when a lot of people were banging on the "post-PC world" drum and anointed the iPad as the harbinger.

They said laptops wouldn't be as necessary. They were right. Lots of people who needed a laptop now only need a tablet or a phone. The laptop and the desktop were never in danger of going away, though, even in 2012.

> Anything that requires productivity, e.g. content creation, is better done with a keyboard and some kind of instrument more precise than a finger.

That demands a clarification because I write computer programs, which I consider to be 'productive', and I hardly need a pointing device. I wonder if people were equally sceptical of mice catching on.

> Any work involving accumulation of material from multiple sources (e.g. research) i.e. multitasking, is going to benefit from a larger screen form factor.

Give me multitasking, sure, but I very, very rarely have multiple windows of separate applications showing; I might just have a weird workflow, but it just doesn't demand it, and I like having individual windows maximised. Maybe I (think I) find it less distracting.

Yes you are an outlier. If I'm working on a web app, I will probably have Visual Studio running, the browser, the browser debugger window, maybe Fiddler and Slack. I work okay with two monitors but when space allows I've worked with three and even four.

I still can't believe that there are people who actually think VR is going to be used by anyone besides people who play video games. I've used an Oculus, and I've used a Vive, and I've used a Google Cardboard, and I've tried all sorts of neat demos.

I fully believe a photorealistic experience can be had, and I fully believe that that experience will be able to exist at a reasonable price point, but I don't believe normal people will be interested in such an experience.

As a medium, it's not nice to use with other people, which is a huge part of the way we consume our media. I don't believe that normal people are going to ever socialize by looking at each others avatars. If you consider interacting with someone's avatar socializing, you should understand that is why people make jokes at the expense of World of Warcraft players. Once the novelty wears off, people aren't going to find it interesting.

It's not great for text either, and I don't think it will ever be better than a 4k monitor for text... Always bet on text. http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html

I agree that AR could be huge. But VR gets way too much hype.

If you haven't read 'Rainbow's End' by Vernor Vinge, you should. Great look at how near-future technology might mingle with our lives, particularly the AR/VR aspect of it.

I was just discussing with my wife how noticeable it is that we loathe calling people except for a select few individuals. It is widely recognized younger generations prefer to text. However if their friends could have a visible presence next to them, I think there's something to be said for experiencing something and having that person "next to" you, even if virtually.

A recent A16Z podcast touched on this with telepresence/VR at a basketball game, and how even just having a basic VR representation of someone you were watching with seated next to you helped dramatically to improve immersion.

Minor pedantic correction: there's no apostrophe in the title. It's Rainbows End.

VR could be huge in simulated travel, much bigger than video games. What if, during your lunch break, you could book an hour with a camera-equipped Segway in Hong Kong and a take a look around the night market?

International tourism is available to only a very small percentage of the world's population. VR could be an interesting substitute that gives a travel-like experience to millions/billions of people.

Depressing.

> Phones, surprisingly, seem to be continuing to eat away at the desktop use cases

It's only surprising if we look at smartphones as phones... really they're just PCs, personal computers, the most portable version.

All other computing is either enterprise computers (in my experience, veeeery low-frequency, low-value business. Most people in offices are on computers with $150 of hardware that's years old and more than good enough for internet, email, office and basic database/administrative packages) and gaming (mostly separated into a console industry).

What's left really are students and some professionals who work from home. But I've got plenty of working friends who simply don't use computers anymore at home.

for smartphones to make bigger inroads on desktop/laptop/tablet computing the cost per month is going to need to come down a lot.

IMO, we’re seeing a very slow divergence from iOS-for-pocket-devices and iOS-for-tablets. You can see that today with multitasking support. Someday the “Springboard” desktop for iPads has to evolve away from the iPhone and vice versa.

I’ll bet a sandwich that Xcode for iPad is coming within two years. That won't mean anything to the consumer market, of course, but it will be remembered as the point where tablet computing got Real.

> Xcode for iPad is coming within two years

Who is asking for it?

Young would-be developers who grew up on touchscreens, and find the notion of pushing around a pointer — instead of directly manipulating things — to be archaic and silly.

But what about the tiny-ass screen? It makes my head hurt to think about writing code on an iPad. Are they going to add HDMI?

Also wake me up when iOS isn't an absolutely fascist walled garden.

> I keep wondering when the desktop/laptop form factor is finally going to die.

The grand piano didn't die when the keytar was invented, I don't think laptop/desktop machine form factors are in terrible danger either.

desktops aren't going anywhere, calm your farm.

heavy lifting stuff gets done on desktop.

For now, while the apps that require heavy lifting outclass the horsepower of most laptops. But the list of things high-end laptops cannot handle is growing shorter every day. There will likely always be specialty activities, but there's also the concept of using the laptop as a thin client connected remotely to the cloud where the heavy lifting happens.

True, but actual heavy lifting work is probably <1% of the current desktop market. Most of it is browsing, messaging, documents.

Ever see someone working with "documents?" They have multiple windows open, but Excel spreadsheets, etc. the business market is a big chunk of what's left of the laptop/desktop market, and it's not amenable to tablets.

So when you need to do heavy lifting, you just give up because all you got is a tablet?

Besides, as far as programming goes, I'm happy I got all the power I can find to iterate quickly, and tablet != power.

This is a response to FatalBaboon, but I can't replay to his comment.

If you need more power, you remotely connect to a server that has as much power as you need.

(I say this as I'm currently on my laptop ssh'd into a Unix server to run cadence)

Yes but that doesn't apply to tablets unless you use a bluetooth keyboard. At that point you have a laptop in a strange formfactor and an OS that isn't optimised for this particular usecase.

Yes. I was thinking more of devices like the one-port Macbook than tablets.

> Phones, surprisingly, seem to be continuing to eat away at the desktop use cases, which is expected, but I wasn't expecting them to be carrying the brunt of it, and there are ergonomic limits to how far that can go.

I'm curious as to how the ergonomics of extended coding sessions on an iPad would work out. Hunching over a touch screen for eight hours a day seems like it could get horribly uncomfortable.

Is anyone out there using an Android tablet for full time coding work?

You wouldn't need to be hunched over a touch screen though. bluetooth keyboard that either acts as a stand itself(like what Apple and Microsoft make for their respective devices), or a separate keyboard and stand. In that regard, it's not different than the ergonomics of a laptop, and people have been doing extended typing sessions on those for years.

Walk into any office in the universe. Lots of PCs that aren't going anywhere.

Desktop/laptop is disappearing from marginal computer users, and the slowdown in technology drove a product with a 33 month service life in 2000 to a 60-72 month life today.

It's not dead, just not growing in sales.

iPad sales slowed down because once you've bought one the need to upgrade is pretty low. You don't drop them like phones so the break-factor is low. I'm still happy using an iPad 2 - it's plenty fast for web browsing and YouTube.

also, it's less important/less used than my laptop or phone, so that further makes the $600 upgrade a lower priority

Still, reading on an ipad is the best electronic reading experience imo. Kindle would beat it if you could display pdfs or math books reasonably. But an ipad beats the crap out of android for battery life; not necessarily screen-on time, but the silent drain when you leave it shut in your bag. When I leave my ipad in my backpack for a week, 1-2% battery is gone. My android tablet would drain in a week.

Also becuase the new iPhones are pretty much big enough in my view for most people especially the +

Or, well, maybe the desktop/laptop will just keep going strong. Nothing compares to dual screens + real life at the same time. I want natural light AND big screen estate!

iPads still sell several times more than macs - which are the number one notebook sold. For both it's simply the same effect: the market is saturated, people don't buy a new iPad or a new Macbook every 2 years. For phones this also seems more and more likely to come. For the first phones every bit of performance of a new generation made a big difference, now it doesn't matter as much anymore.